by Albright Labs
Most teams meet deliverability the hard way. A campaign goes out, the open rate is a third of what it was last quarter, and nobody can point at what changed.
Usually nothing changed in the writing. What changed was reputation, and reputation is mostly decided before the first email is sent, by configuration choices made weeks earlier.
Authentication gets your mail through the door. Reputation decides which room it lands in. Both are setup problems, and both are fixable in an afternoon.
Keep Bulk Email Off Your Primary Domain
This is the first decision and the one that costs the most to get wrong.
Your primary domain carries your invoices, your contracts, your support replies, and your password resets. If a bulk campaign damages that domain’s reputation, you lose the ability to reliably reach clients who are already paying you.
Give campaigns their own sending domain. Something close to your brand, obviously related, but structurally independent. When something goes wrong, and eventually something will, the blast radius stops at a domain you can afford to retire.
This holds for a newsletter, a customer announcement or a member mailing as much as for anything else: keep bulk mail and the mail that runs your business from sharing a single point of failure.
Choose the Sending Domain Carefully
Not all domains start from the same place.
- Hyphens and numbers: avoid them. They make a domain look improvised to the person reading the From line, and there is no upside to them.
- Extension: a
.comis safest. A.coor.iois fine. Your country’s official extension is fine. - Heavily abused extensions: some extensions carry a large share of spam and malware domains. Spamhaus publishes a running list of the most abused top-level domains. Check it before you register, and pick something that is not near the top.
You are being judged partly on the statistical company your domain keeps, not on taste.
Three Records, Not One
Authentication is three separate things, and teams routinely stop after two.
SPF publishes which servers are allowed to send on your domain’s behalf. Without it, anyone can claim to be you.
DKIM cryptographically signs each message so the receiving server can verify it was not altered in transit and did come from you.
DMARC ties the two together. A message passes DMARC when SPF or DKIM passes and the domain it passed for matches the domain in the From line. DMARC also tells receiving servers what to do when that fails, and asks them to send you reports. It is the one most often skipped, because the first two are enough to stop mail bouncing outright.
Skipping it is no longer an option at volume. Since February 2024, Google and Yahoo require anyone sending around 5,000 or more messages a day to their users to have SPF, DKIM and DMARC in place, with the From domain aligned. Microsoft applied the same rule to Outlook.com, Hotmail and Live addresses from May 2025. A DMARC policy of p=none is enough to meet those rules, and even below that volume, Gmail requires SPF or DKIM on everything it accepts. Without DMARC you also lose visibility into who is spoofing your domain.
Set up all three. It is a DNS task, not an engineering project.
Send Through a Reputable Provider
Mail is judged partly by the path it travels. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 are where ordinary business email lives, and established sending services carry most legitimate bulk mail. When your message travels a well-kept path, it looks like the rest of that traffic. When it travels a path used mostly by careless bulk senders, it looks like theirs.
Before you choose, read your provider’s terms. Google Workspace’s acceptable use policy forbids using the service to send unsolicited mass email, and some sending services, Postmark among them, only allow permission-based lists. A confirmed opt-in list is what those terms are written for. Mail that is legal can still break the rules of the account you send it through, and losing that account costs more than any campaign returns.
Set Up a Custom Tracking Domain
Sending tools rewrite the links in your emails so clicks can be counted. By default, those rewritten links often point at a domain shared by every customer of that tool. So the reputation attached to those links is the pooled reputation of everyone using the same product, including whoever is currently running something you would not want your name near.
Where your tool supports a custom tracking domain, it moves that reputation back under your control. It is a subdomain and a DNS record. Teams that skip it can spend weeks rewriting copy trying to fix a problem that was never in the copy.
Send From a Person, Not a Department
info@, hello@, and contact@ are department addresses. They read as broadcast, they are more likely to be sorted into a promotional category, and they give the recipient nobody to reply to.
Send from a real person with a first and last name. Set the display name to that person’s name, or the person and the organization together. Email people signed up for still reads best as a message from someone, and the headers should say so before the body has to.
What This Costs
An afternoon, one domain registration, and some DNS records.
That is the entire argument for doing it. None of this is expensive, none of it is difficult, and all of it compounds. A sending domain configured properly on day one accrues reputation quietly for years. A sending domain configured carelessly accrues the other kind, and reputation is far harder to repair than it is to build.
What Setup Cannot Fix
Setup is necessary and not sufficient.
Perfect authentication will not save a poorly targeted list. A clean domain will not rescue an email that annoys the person reading it. The technical foundation determines whether you are eligible for the inbox. What you send, to whom, and how often determines whether you stay there.
Setup is the part that feels like progress. It is measurable, it has a checklist, and it ends. The rest of deliverability is a practice rather than a project, and it does not end.
Final Thoughts
Deliverability rewards looking ordinary.
Every item here moves you closer to resembling a normal person sending normal mail from a normal domain through normal infrastructure. The mailbox providers are sorting mail from senders who look established and accountable from mail that looks improvised.
Set the foundation once, correctly, and you stop fighting your own infrastructure. Then the only variable left is whether the email was worth sending.
Sendly is built around the same idea. It sends every campaign through your own email account, from an address at your own domain, so your SPF and DKIM line up with what receiving servers expect. It will not swap in an address of its own, and if no From address is set, it holds the campaign and tells you rather than sending mail that lands in spam. It does not offer a custom tracking domain, so that item is one to weigh against how much click tracking matters to you.